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Hospitality workers more likely to abuse legal drugs than any other industry

ELEANOR HALL: With late nights, long hours and stressful work, the hospitality industry has long been associated with high rates of drug and alcohol abuse.

Now West Australian researchers have added prescription drug abuse to that list.

A study from Curtin University has found that hospitality workers are more likely to misuse legal drugs than any other industry.

Lucy Martin reports.

LUCY MARTIN: Every three years, Australians are surveyed about their drug use and now researchers have studied results from the last decade to see who is deliberately misusing prescription or over-the-counter drugs.

Around 70,000 people aged between 20 and 65 were asked if they'd used a pharmaceutical drug for non-medical purposes.

Curtin University's Mark Harris explains what they found.

MARK HARRIS: The key findings were that workers in hospitality were more likely to misuse pharmaceutical drugs, and also blue collar workers as well. The ones in terms of a where we found a significantly negative effect were really only retail trade industries and finance and insurance ones.

LUCY MARTIN: The data also suggests 3.7 per cent of working age Australians surveyed reported misusing a pharmaceutical drug.

Professor Harris says the true figure could be much higher.

MARK HARRIS: An individual is asked, have they misused the drug or not. So clearly there is a kind of - if anything we would suspect that those kind of rates would be underestimated, yeah, because we would think that quite a few people who have done that would not like to admit it.

PHILLIP CROWLEY: I think it's really under reported, under estimated and under treated. I've seen it in a whole range of ages, a whole range of socioeconomic groups and a whole range of professions. It may be that those people are more likely to admit to it because they don't see that they're at risk of a regulatory response.

LUCY MARTIN: The report suggests workplace testing, which is already done in the mining industry, could help to address the problem.

Richard Clancy from the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry say employers must walk a fine line.

RICHARD CLANCY: It is a new frontier, because if you cross the boundary between legitimate use of prescription medicines or medicines from over the counter into the abuse that flows from taking excessive amounts, that's very difficult for employers to grapple with, and as a community, we're still working out how we respond. Whereas you have a situation with drugs and alcohol where you can introduce a drug testing regime, it is difficult when its medicines available under prescriptions or over the counter.

LUCY MARTIN: The report also says more education is needed on the risks of prescription drugs.

Earlier this month an interim report from an advisory committee to the Therapeutic Goods Administration recommended making codeine-based products like painkillers prescription only from June next year.

Addiction specialist Dr Phillip Crowley.

PHILLIP CROWLEY: There's going to be a large number of people that have been hidden, basically opiate addicted, that are going to be suddenly seeking treatment. I suspect that that number will exhaust the availability of services because the services are already pretty much unavailable to people with opiate addiction.